What an Honor

The week has been another fabulous one down here in Orlando. Work has been starting to get busy, which makes me really happy!

I had Monday off so I went and did some playing in the parks. I went with Tiauna and some girls from the ward. We went to Animal Kingdom and it was great fun. It was one of the girls first trips to that park so it was fun going on the rides with her like the Safari, Everest and Dinosaur! After the park closed we went to Cici’s pizza for dinner and ate too much! It was so good. To make the not so healthy dinner worse we went to a friends house to watch the finale of the bachelor and eat fattening foods. I brought crème puffs and you can tell it was a bunch of girls eating them because we ate the whole container or 90!


Waiting inline for Everest, you can kind of see the mountain in the background




The big prestigious Disney Honors was this weekend, where they brought in big name Instrumental and Choral adjudicators for the National Concert Band, Orchestra and Choral Invitational. It was a really cool event. It started Thursday night with a welcome celebration at the Animal Kingdom that was a little private party just for them at Dinoland USA complete with burgers and a DJ, I sadly didn’t get to work that event but oh well, there wasn’t much for me to do anyways there! Then Friday they had some seminars for the kids from Disney Entertainment and Dr. Tim, who is an amazing speaker for music students. He talks about leadership and stuff, and I saw him in high school and he does kind of the same stuff I saw back then, but it is still a good message to hear! I was actually in the office again on Friday so I took an extended lunch to go watch his spiel with the choral kiddos. I almost got stuck in parade traffic backstage which would have made my lunch break even longer, it was kind of intense for a second!

Saturday was the big day of performances. I got to be at work at 6:30 am, boy it was not fun getting up at 4:30 on a Saturday! I’m not a fan of being to work before the sun is up. We got all the little last minute things set up and then the groups started arriving. The performances were held at a gorgeous theater at the Orange County Convention Center. That place is huge! When you are walking through it kind of feels like an airport and they even have announcements going as you walk through the huge corridors that sound like you are in an airport. The theater was amazing; it had a very live sound that I loved. The piano was a beautiful natural wood color to match the sound shells that where on the stage. The group that I hosted was so good, and one of the girls that I work with told me that a girl from my choir had won American Idol the night before at Hollywood Studios. (Each day there are like 7 shows, 3 people sing at each show, one wins and goes to the finale show at the end of the night. The 7 sing and one wins a golden ticket which is like a fast pass for actual American Idol auditions. It is a cool new attraction they have) I was super excited because the way the rotation worked out with the adjudicators, Craig Jessop was the one that worked with my group. It was so fun to sit in on their clinic and listen to things that he had to say. I am so excited about this aspect of my job, sitting in on the clinics. I bought a notebook to take notes to learn from all of these amazing musicians I get to work with the next 10 weeks! After I took my choir back to the bus I went and sat in on the last choral clinic of the day. This choir was also very impressive, it had about 90 students in it. I learned some very neat conducting tips from this guy. I didn’t get to see the whole thing because I was called on to use my mad string skills. The Con Selmer family of brands supplies the bigger instruments for us to use during festival season like basses, cellos and all the fun percussion stuff, and then they sell them when we are done. It is pretty neat and they come with the cool Disney performing arts logo on them. So since it was the first event of the season the instruments were brand new and needed to have packaging stuff taken off and then when we opened the cellos we noticed that the cellos didn’t have the bridges in them, so I then started to finish assembling the cellos, since no one else had any string experience and had no clue what to do or what strings they were, because I then tuned them a little to get them in the ball park of where they should be, not octaves off! I did break a bridge and a string, but oh well I had to tune like 10 of them so such is life. Then I was done, I didn’t get to hear any of the instrumental groups, but I’ll survive, there will be plenty to hear throughout the rest of the season. I then went home and pretty much crashed, I can’t tell you when I fell asleep, I don’t remember!

Today is daylight savings, so we lost an hour. I think it is kind of dumb because now you have to reset all you clocks and then in six months you have to change it all back. People think I’m weird because Arizona doesn’t do such foolish things. We are just fine with not ever changing our time! This week will be fun because Marilee is here to play for a few days, it is going to be tons of fun!